Let me start off by saying how nice California is. I couldn't have picked a better time to get the heck out of Houston as when I did. The weather has been much more amiable to my liking than the sweltering Houston summers that I have endured for the last 15 years or so. Now when I say sweltering, I mean hotter than anything I have ever been accustomed to. Imagine my surprise when I get to California and it is rather cool at night. Going from highs in the ninties back in Houston to highs in the low eighties was a relief on my weathered soul.

     Everything that led up to my leaving for California can be summed up like this. In November of 2002 I got a call from my mom telling me what I had feared most, she had breast cancer and that scared the hell out of the family. I flew out to California to help my mom recover after the surgery for a 2 week period. When I got back to Houston, I had made my decision to move to California and notified my boss of my intentions. He said it was not a problem and I was more than welcome to continue working till I was ready to go. And that is exactly what I did. So now my mom is in the midst of radiation therapy and sleeping while I try to keep my ramblings coherent for those that are reading this.

    About a month or so ago my mom noticed that one of her plants was moving and she found the mole. This mole was not one to go quietly into the night and retreat from the larger mammals, namely my mother and I. He quickly became a bit more than shall we say a pest. That bugger was a monster feeding on my mom's ivy that she has had for over 30 years. She had that ivy back in Ohio and in Florida where she retired and I was not about to let a small varmit of any shape or size make off with it as food or bedding for it's cozy little nest. So we went to the local supply house and got some super duper smoke bombs that seemed to work for a few days. See the mole come out of a hole and whammo, drop the bomb in the hole and cover it up.

    So after a near two week ordeal of dropping bombs and watching my mom's back patio garden turn into Sherman's March To The Sea. We went back to the supply house and I got some poison peanuts. Put a capfull of the peanuts into the first hole that I saw that day. Nothing happened, so we started to rejoice and sing to the lord for this divine intervention. Cut to the next day, when much to the chagrin of us both the mole reappeared. I went and gave that little monster not one, but two capfulls of poison peanuts. Then began the long 4 day wait. I say this because from time to time the little ivy eating bastard would not show his face for a day or two at a time. So the wait began and the moles holes were duly noted to ensure that any new ones would not be overlooked in Operation Recover Garden.

    Now begins Operation Recover Garden. A daunting task not for the weak of heart. The moles precision eating and destruction of the grass has been immense. What once looked like a decent pation garden has been reduced to a mere shell of it's former self. How does one approach this task, alcohol. Lots of beer and sitting on the back patio gave me an inspiration. That is not entirely true, mom had a full bag of Scott's Rye Grass that could be used to return the garden to it's former state of grace. So I begin seeding and watering every night. After watering for a week and with few results, I suggested that we go back to the supply house and get some fertilizer. Unbeknownst to me, mom had a box of that venerable garden fertilizer, Miracle Grow. Since applying the Miracle Grow in a liberal fashion every week, the grass has come back in droves. Life can be good. You just have to figure out how.
 

    Since most of my day as of late has been centered around helping my mom out, I do have a bit of spare time on my hands. So I was reading somewhere on the web about a new game that has turned into the new drug in my life, Rise of Nations. If you have a fast web connection (56k is not what anyone means by fast), get this game. The demo is all sorts of shades of awesome. Starting off with spearmen and making it all the way to the nuclear age is just all sorts of fun. From having a nuclear holocaust to bombing folks back to the stone age, Rise of Nations is what a game should be. Unless of course you are claw handed and like Pink GBA's. Then maybe Hello Kitty is what you should be playing.

    My brother recently turned me on to a new program for transferring your old albums to compact disc. It is called Cakewalk Pyro 2003. It can take your old albums and clean em up noise wise and get rid of the pops and hisses. It can also take MP3's of various loudness and level them to make a cd with no depreciable loss of quality. I think he said it cost 50 bucks and let me tell you, it is well worth it if you have a ton of old albums that no cd's are in print for. The only real drawback I have found is that it uses a ton of memory. So I would only suggest it for those using Windows 2000 or later only. All in all, a very good program that has extensive help files built into it.

    Easy and I have said this many times to many people. Get Zonealarm if you want to shut down the open ports that your pc is not using. Microsoft products are not the best out in terms of security. Ever wonder why Microsoft is always saying to patch this and that? Maybe it is because they are trying too hard to rush a product out for distribution. When that happens, things get left out that shouldn't be left out. Just because they are the number one software company in the world doesn't mean they won't have their share of failure either. Zonealarm shuts down the open ports and reports when something or someone is trying to access your system through a port that normally isn't used. I cannot stress enough the importance of this to those that have high speed connections.

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And that's all I have to say about that.